Broken Hearts
by N1ghthawk
Summary: Mako and Raleigh are both something different. Something not quite human. It's not until they find each other that they realize their secrets are what make them drift compatible. Cross-posted on AO3
1. Mako

She is five and the sparks from her father's forge draw her in. She reaches for them and they fall on her fingers like snow. Her father snatches her back and tells her that fire is dangerous and not to be treated so carelessly. She asks why he puts his hands into it. He says he will tell her when she is older. Three days later he gives her an old staff, and even though the wood is worn smooth from many hands, she can feel the carved dragon slithering around it. It feels like it moves, but she likes that.

She is ten and there is a real dragon before her eyes. Pictures in every newspaper of one climbing from the water onto the shore of America. She asks her father if the dragons are the same as the ones in the legends he and mother tell. He says these are like the evil dragons, the ones that the good and brave dragons must fight. Mother gives her something that night. A little pin, a dragon coiled in a circle with its teeth bared and the crest on its head gleaming with red enamel. It looks like the dragon on her treasured staff, and it is warm when she touches it. It never feels cold, not even in winter.

She is thirteen and she tells no one that the blue in her hair is not her choice. She tells no one that it appeared when the blood of the evil dragon fell on her hand like the fire sparks in the forge. She tells no one that the dragon pin sunk through her jacket when the blood touched it, and that that night she watched it glow through her thin pajamas as it worked its way under the skin into her heart. She lies there and hears the fire whisper in her blood, and finally she understands. She is the dragon in all those stories. It is her job to kill the monsters.

She is eighteen and the fire in her blood is what gets her through the first terrible weeks at the Academy, where people underestimate her and think she is too delicate for this. She lets the fire burn in her hands at night, when she takes the staff her father gave her and practices long and hard while others sleep. In the morning there are scorch marks on the mat. Her dragon staff is the only one that does not turn to ash in her hands on those nights. She challenges all comers and wins, and she must, because she must be good enough, strong enough, to fight the monsters. All she has left of her family is the secret they protected and the duty they held. The duty now memorialized in the red and gold circle above her heart.

She is twenty and her new father says she cannot take a dragon heart into the drift. He says she is too strong for anyone else to bear. That the fire in her heart would be too much. So she turns to work restoring jaegers, where she can take the heat in her hands and bend metal to suit the places it is meant to go. She can stare into the heart of the double nuclear core of the Mark III jaeger she is repairing and not be burned. She knows that this heart is like hers. Fiery, damaged, and desperate to fight back. And she waits for when those hearts can be joined. It is all she dreams of in the night now. Fire reaching fire.

She is twenty two, and when her father says she needs more control she knows he saw the fire in her eyes. She has not let that fire come out this way in years. But the dragon in her heart is awake and calling out to something in Raleigh as wild as itself. She can feel the snow and ice that balance her fire, the wolf standing beside the dragon, and she knows this is the missing piece of the puzzle. This is the one she will fight beside, the one who can withstand her fire. Even the dragons of legend did not defeat the monsters alone.


	2. Raleigh

He is seven years old and playing "ferals" with Yancey. His mother comes in and scolds them. It's nothing to joke about, she says. If you get bitten they come take you away and you have to get chipped, and then you belong to the government and they can do what they want with you. She says things about experiments and military that Raleigh doesn't understand. She tells them never to go into the forest alone, and Rals hears stories at school about Anchorage kids who have disappeared on hunting trips.

He is fifteen, sitting in a hospital chair with his arm wrapped in gauze, and Yancey is next to him, talking over his dad arguing with the two men in black uniforms. He's asking Rals to bite him, so whatever happens they'll be together. He listens to Yancey lie to the men, say he was bitten too. There's a sting in his neck and then he isn't Raleigh Becket to anyone but Yance. He's W118973. And they're sending him to the Jaegers, because they say he's a fighter.

He is seventeen, swapping blood samples for Yancey's, so they can stay in the Jaeger program together. He is lying to everyone, saying he's shy, that he doesn't want to run with a pack and neither does Yance, because he doesn't want them to know Yancey isn't really feral. He has no friends, because he refuses to spend time with the other ferals, and the humans avoid him and Yancey. Yance is driving them home after being cooped up in the Shatterdomes gets to be too much and Rals just needs to _run_ , ruining his own clothes so it looks like both of them were running wild, and buying more pizza than any two people should be able to eat.

He is twenty, and they're the golden boys now, with wins under their belt and personalities that make people want to like them. Everyone calls them the wolf pack, and Rals has met more than a few girls with wolf tattoos on their backs below cutoff shirts and questions about just how furry he and his brother are. No one knows Yance is lying. They've almost forgotten themselves. And then they don't have to pretend anymore. It's a playful scuffle, adrenaline high in the wake of a big win and a near-death experience, and in a split second it's fangs through skin and blood on the bunkroom floor. It's nothing serious, nothing to write home about if they had anyone to write to, but they don't need to trade blood samples anymore.

He is twenty-one and he lies again, because it is all he knows how to do. He gets up in front of all of them, still hooked to an IV, still with bandages on his shoulder and a Yancey-sized hole in his heart and his head, and tells them it's his fault. Says the feral side bled into the Drift, made him reckless, and Yance died because of him. At the time he doesn't think it's a lie. His contract is sold to one of the corporations building the Wall of Life. He packs the few things he can still say he owns, the photos and that sweater of Yance's he had that day they were hunting, and then they put him in a truck with nineteen others like him.

He is twenty-two and the kid brother of the welder he works with, on the boy's third day on the Wall, falls into the Kaiju Blue-tainted water. He disobeys every directive, ignores the sting from the collar on his neck that keeps the ferals from running away or attacking their bosses, and goes after them. When they come out of the water he is freezing and coughing and gasping for air, but the kid is alive. And Raleigh leaves the shoddy ferals' hospital with the lingering effects of K-pneumonia and a series of long scars on his back deeper than the drivesuit burns on his left side. He doesn't know this isn't the last time.

He is twenty-six and Stacker Pentecost buys him back. He doesn't tell him his lungs are ruined, but the physical probably will. He doesn't tell him how many people he saved. He doesn't know that Stacker already knows. He tries to hide his scars from Mako when he sees her in the door, because she doesn't need to see that he's nothing but broken pieces holding together with duct tape and string just like his duffel bag. He doesn't want to drift with her, he doesn't want her to see the wolf, and the pain, and the darkness, and the aloneness. When they drift, he sees the dragon in her blood. And he knows what she lives with. And he knows they can do this. Because they have a wild side.


End file.
